Hydraulic fracturing may be used to enhance the permeability of rock by injecting water or other fluids into wells at high pressure permeating the surrounding rock to erode or expand existing fractures and/or create new fractures extending from the well. The propagation of the fluids may create a fracture network. The fracture network or pipe network may then be drained to deliver or extract natural resources such as oil or gas into the well. The fracture network extending from each well may be modeled e.g. as a Stimulated Rock Volume (SRV) to predict the reach of each well's drainage to determine where to position other wells to drain a maximal amount of resources.
The flow of liquid through rock may be measured, for example, by geophones or accelerometers, placed at a plurality of discrete positions referred to as “sensor locations” to measure “microseismic events” (e.g. events 1-7 are shown in FIG. 1A). Microseismic events may include man-made explosions or blasts produced by stimulating geological structures e.g. by hydraulic fracturing. Man-made events are generally smaller or “micro” compared to naturally occurring seismic events. The resulting microseismic even data e.g. (x,y,z,t) produced may be recorded by the geophones.
The path of liquid between these spaced-apart events may be extrapolated from the event measurements to model the overall fracture network or SRV. Current systems extrapolate the flow of liquid between events using a homogenous model, assuming that liquid flows isotropically or omni-directionally through rock in all directions with equal probability. However, in reality, rock is typically heterogeneous and liquid tends to flow along certain preferred directions e.g. along the paths of the fracture network.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art and it would be highly useful to provide a system and method to model a fracture network taking into account the heterogeneous properties of fractured rock.